Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Sartre took her along to the Ecole Normale ball one year. He appeared in spats, with Simone Jollivet on his arm in one of her sensational costumes. She created quite a stir. As a token of friendship, she gave Sartre and Nizan a lamp shade for their study, made out of a pair of skimpy lace purple panties—her own.

  The agrégation results were displayed on July 30, 1929. Twenty-one students had competed for the orals (several of the eligible students had not turned up), and thirteen were successful. First place went to Jean-Paul Sartre. The runner-up, just two points behind him, was Simone de Beauvoir. There was a considerable gap between her and the third student. Paul Nizan came fifth.

  Four of the thirteen successful candidates were women. It was a record. There were only eight women in France with an agrégation in philosophy. The head of the jury of examiners, Professor André Lalande, felt obliged to comment on the phenomenon. There had been no special indulgence shown to the women, he assured people. The written exams were anonymous, and it was impossible, he said, to determine the sex of educated people from their handwriting.30

  The most staggering intellectual triumph that year was undoubtedly Simone de Beauvoir’s. Having taken on a daunting double load, she was, at twenty-one, the youngest ever to pass the agrégation. She had been studying philosophy at a tertiary level for just three years. Sartre had been taking it for seven.31 Unlike him, she had not had the rigorous intellectual training of two years of preparatory classes (hypokhâgne and khâgne) for the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, followed by the ENS itself. She was just a lowly Sorbonne student. Nor had she had a practice run at the exams.

  It would emerge in later years that the 1929 jury had debated at length whether to give the prize to Sartre or to Beauvoir. The members had been inordinately impressed by the young woman’s rigorous argumentation. Finally, they had decided on Sartre. He was, after all, the Normalien, and he was sitting the examination for the second time.

  On August 5, 1929, Simone de Beauvoir left with her family for their annual vacation in Limousin. She loved that region of France. Her childhood summers spent with her father’s family on the vast estate called Meyrignac, in the hilly countryside near Uzerche, were idyllic. That summer her grandfather was no longer there—it was his death she had been mourning that spring—and they stayed with her aunt and cousins in the second family house, La Grillère, four kilometers away from the village of Saint-Germain-les-Belles. Beauvoir knew it would probably be her last summer vacation with her family. The thought had once filled her with anguish. But this year, her future seemed wholly exciting.

  She wandered in the fields and chestnut groves, breathing in the fragrance of freshly mown hay and honeysuckle, and feeling passionately happy. On the second day, a letter arrived from Sartre. Beauvoir wrote in her journal that she missed his presence. She had so many things she wanted to tell him. But she was not in love. “I need Sartre, and I love Maheu. I love Sartre for what he brings me, and Maheu for what he is.”

  When she did not hear from Sartre for several days, she was filled with anguish. “Why this silence, just after a letter where I let myself go?” Finally a thick envelope arrived, which gave details about his imminent visit.

  She met his train from Paris on August 20. “Immense joy,” she wrote, “and some timidity which made me artificial.” The prospect of entertaining him in Limousin was daunting. Would he be bored away from Paris? On the first day, she suggested a walk. Sartre laughed at her. He was allergic to chlorophyll, he said, and the only way he could cope with it was to forget it. They would find a nice meadow and sit and talk. By the end of that day, Beauvoir could see that boredom would never be their problem. “I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.”32

  Sartre stayed at the Hôtel de la Boule d’Or in Saint-Germain-les-Belles, the village where Beauvoir’s cousins went to mass each Sunday. Beauvoir would wake up at seven o’clock, remain awhile in bed, exhilarated by the thought of seeing him, then run over the meadows to meet him, thinking about all the things she wanted to tell him that day. If she was expected home for lunch, she took cider, cheese, and gingerbread for him to eat while waiting for her in the meadow. Sometimes, Poupette and their cousin Madeleine left him a picnic in an abandoned pigeon loft down the road from the house.

  Sartre was an attentive listener, and Beauvoir found stories pouring out of her. They lay close together in the grass, and while the shadows lengthened around them, she talked about her life—her parents, Poupette, the Cours Désir, Zaza, Jacques. Sartre had a talent for seeing things from her perspective. When she told him about her cousin Jacques and the hopes she once had of marrying him, Sartre commented that it must be difficult for a woman with her background not to marry, but personally he thought it a trap. He admired her “Valkyrie spirit,” and hoped she would never lose it.

  Sartre was encouraging; he was also full of projects and plans for their future life together. They would have adventures and travels, he told her, and while they would work extremely hard, they would also lead dazzling lives of freedom and passion. He would give her everything he could. The only thing he could not give her was his person. He needed to be free.

  It was clear that Sartre’s help would not be the conventional sort. He scorned anything that smacked of conformity or conventionality. The idea of a regular job, with colleagues and a boss, was anathema to him. Nor did he want to be a professional literary man, scribbling away in a musty study lined with books. The thought of settling down in one place had no appeal. And though he had once been engaged, these days the idea of getting married, having children, and acquiring possessions horrified him. He had a mission: to be a great writer. Nothing else mattered. In order to write, he had to experience the world.

  Sartre explained to Beauvoir his theory of liberty and contingency. It was the subject on which they had written in their exams, and he had been thinking about it for some time. As he saw it, individuals lived in a state of fundamental absurdity, or “contingency.” There was no god; life had no preexisting meaning. Each individual had to assume his freedom, create his own life. There was no natural order; people held their destiny in their own hands. It was up to them to determine the substance of their lives, even the way they chose to love. It was frightening to be free. Most people fled from their freedom. But Sartre embraced his. He was not going to allow any preestablished code to determine his life. His life was going to be his own construction. Beauvoir thought this a beautiful philosophy.

  In the first few days, they met in the mornings in the village square. Curious faces watched them behind curtains. Later they chose a more discreet place, a chestnut grove between La Grillère and the village. In Paris, Beauvoir had felt awkward when Sartre kissed her. But in those Limousin meadows, surrounded by birdsong, she enjoyed his soft kisses and caresses. “Now I accept without embarrassment the slightly disturbing sensation of being in his arms and feeling his power,” she wrote in her journal. “My admiration and my faith in Jean-Paul are absolute, and my tenderness for my dear Leprechaun is without reservation.”

  Five days into Sartre’s stay, the two of them were sprawled close together in a meadow when they saw Simone’s parents walking toward them. They sprang up. Simone’s father looked embarrassed. He told Sartre that people were gossiping, and he was afraid he had to ask him to leave the district. Simone flushed with anger and told her father that that was no way to talk to her friend. Her mother started to shout at her. Sartre quietly but firmly said he would leave as soon as he could, but he and their charming daughter were working on a philosophical inquiry, and they had to finish it first. The parents retreated to the house.

  Sartre usually ate dinner at his hotel, and Simone went back to the house. After the meal, she would reappear with Poupette and their cousin Madeleine. Sartre organized endless high-spirited games. He had them improvising plays and acting out parts. Leading the way with his fine tenor voice, he got them to sing. “We laughed
and laughed,” Poupette would recall, “and the summer softly slipped away.”33

  Sartre left on September 1, and Beauvoir jotted down her thoughts and memories about those “perfect days.” He had called her “my sweet love.” He had told her he loved her, and assured her he would always love her. He said he was afraid of hurting her. “You do not know how tender your expression can be, dear little girl.”

  “This was the ‘life’ I was waiting for,” she wrote. For the first time ever, she had met a man whom she considered her superior. She felt understood by him, loved and supported. Sartre would help her to be a strong, joyous Valkyrie. His love was full of promises, full of certitude. With him she felt a quite extraordinary harmony (“Oh! Much more than with the Lama or Jacques”). There was something incredibly vital about this man. He made her want to discover herself; he made her want to discover the world. With him, she knew she would never stagnate.

  It was not “an overwhelming passion,” she wrote in her journal. Not yet. It was not comparable to the “madness” and “obsession” she had once felt for Jacques. “But it’s happiness.” Most exciting was the feeling that through Sartre she had found herself. “Never have I loved so much to read and think. Never have I been so alive and happy, or envisaged such a rich future. Oh Jean-Paul, dear Jean-Paul, thank you.”34

  A week after Sartre left, late on a Friday evening, Beauvoir was on the platform of the railway station at Uzerche to meet Maheu. It was a mark of her new independence from her parents. Maheu was coming for the weekend, and he had invited her to stay with him—in two separate rooms in a hotel.

  He stumbled out of a second-class compartment tired, unshaven, his coat slung over his shoulder, and his hat crooked. They caught a bus to a little hotel on the banks of the Vézère. Beauvoir heard him singing in the room next door as he washed and shaved, and she thought to herself how happy she was. After dinner—he was not hungry, and she ate most of his meal as well as her own—they climbed the hill to the church and looked at the stars. They talked for an hour in her room, then he kissed her hand tenderly, wished her good night, and went to his room.

  The next day they walked by the river. He sang “So Blue” and told her stories about the Romans and the Gauls in that region. They had lunch at an inn. He climbed a tree. “I will never forget the young erudite René Maheu perched on a branch, his gray flannel trousers turned up, his hair in his face, his feet the color of the sunset,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. Her shoes were drenched, so she walked barefoot. Maheu threw pebbles into the water.

  That evening at dinner, he ordered a bottle of Chablis Villages, 1923. When she got up from the table, her head was spinning. Maheu stretched out beside her on her bed. They lay close to each other, but Maheu did not make a move. He did not seem to want to leave, and she did not want to tell him to. He talked, and she gazed at him through a mist. After he left, she was sick. “Atrocious night.”

  The next morning was sweet. She loved his “Good morning, Beaver,” his blue pajamas, his eau de cologne, and the soap he lent her. She was still not feeling well, and he was full of tender solicitude. He took her arm. He kissed her hair. He was, as usual, gay and witty, distant and close, ironical and tender, her “prince of lamas.”

  After he departed on the train, Beauvoir wrote in her journal: “It was like a dream lasting two days.” She concluded: “I know exactly what he is, what Sartre is. But I’ll talk about that later.”

  When she returned to Paris in mid-September, Simone de Beauvoir moved out of her parents’ home and rented a fifth-floor room from her maternal grandmother at 91 Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, in Montparnasse. Her grandmother treated her exactly like her other lodgers; Simone could come and go as she pleased. Beauvoir bought some cheap furniture: a table, two chairs, bookshelves, an orange divan. Her sister, Poupette, helped her put up some bright orange wallpaper. Beauvoir pinned up a Michelangelo drawing Maheu had given her, and some satirical sketches by Sartre and Nizan. Stépha, her Polish friend, brought flowers, which Beauvoir put on the table, along with some books, her fountain pen, and her English cigarettes. She looked around rapturously. At last she was beginning her new life.

  TWO

  THE PACT

  October 1929–September 1932

  On October 14, 1929, in that fifth-floor orange-papered room overlooking the plane trees on the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, Beauvoir gave up her virginity.

  Maheu’s visit to Limousin had clarified things. She had been in love with him for months. He was a handsome man, and she frankly desired him. He was kind and affectionate. But he was married, and in any case, he vaguely disappointed her. More than once, he had said to her: “You mustn’t judge me.” She could never quite decide whether he was asking her a favor or giving her an order. But now she had met a man who was not afraid of judgment, a man who believed that his character was the sum total of his actions, a man who asked to be judged.

  By the time Maheu left Limousin, Beauvoir had understood. She needed “Sartre and no one else.” He might be the Little Man, but he lived life so intensely, he seemed bigger than any man she knew. He was burning with ambition, but not in the worldly sense. Material things did not interest him, nor did hobnobbing with famous people. Quite simply, he was convinced he was going to be a great man and that his task was to get on with it. Sartre needed his liberty, but he also wanted Beauvoir to embrace hers. This was not a man who was going to urge her to comply with social conventions.

  She still loved her Prince of Lamas. Theirs was “the most tender of friendships.” But he was bound by other people’s opinions, and too eager to cut a figure in society. Intellectually, he did not satisfy her. “In everyday life, one could be bored with him…. One can’t let one self go, expansively, with this man.”1

  After Maheu left Limousin, she rationalized: “It is good that precisely with this sensual man there is nothing physical between us,…whereas with Sartre, who is not sensual, the harmony of our bodies has a meaning which makes our love more beautiful.”

  There were two weeks of “feverish caresses and lovemaking”2 before Sartre left for Saint-Cyr, at the beginning of November, to begin his military service. Late every night, Sartre left Beauvoir’s flat and went back to his grandparents, the Schweitzers, who had a large apartment in the Latin Quarter.

  The young lovers talked a great deal about the future. Sartre did not suggest marriage. Instead, what he proposed was a “two-year lease.” While he was doing his military service, they would see as much of each other as possible. Beauvoir, instead of entering the teaching profession straight away, which would mean being sent to the provinces, would remain in Paris, make a start on a novel, and do some part-time tutoring. Sartre had inherited a small legacy from his paternal grandmother, and would help Beauvoir out as much as he could.

  At the end of those two years, when Sartre’s military service was finished, he envisaged a period apart. He had applied for a position as a French teacher in a Japanese school in Kyoto, a job that would begin in October 1931. This would mean a separation for a couple of years. Then they would meet up in a new place—Athens or Istanbul, maybe—and live near each other again for a couple of years before striking out again by themselves. That way, their relationship would never degenerate into dull routine.

  Beauvoir did not share Sartre’s lone-hero dreams. She would have much preferred to undertake exotic adventures with him at her side. Her dream was the “Grand Amour,” and she dreaded the idea of long separations. But for the time being, two years seemed a long way off, and she did her best to suppress her fears. She knew Sartre would regard them as a weakness.

  Sartre had made clear from the beginning that monogamy did not interest him. He liked women (far more than men, he always said), and he did not intend to stop having affairs at the age of twenty-three. Nor should Beauvoir, he said. The love they had for each other was “essential,” and primary. They were “two of a kind,” each other’s double, and their relationship would surely last for life. But they sh
ould not deprive themselves of what he called “contingent” affairs, meaning secondary and more arbitrary.

  Sartre felt strongly that love was not about possession. To him, a more generous kind of love meant loving the other person as a free being. When Beauvoir raised the thorny question of jealousy, Sartre said that if they told each other everything, they would never feel excluded from each other’s lives. They should have no secrets from each other. In their love affairs, doubts, insecurities, and obsessions, they should aim for complete openness. He called it “transparency.”

  Beauvoir found the idea as frightening as it was exhilarating. She valued truth and sincerity, but she also treasured her inner life. Throughout her adolescence she had learned to keep her thoughts to herself. She had long since stopped recounting her sins to her father confessor. And yet, here was Sartre wanting her to share her thoughts—all her thoughts—with him.

  Did Beauvoir point out that they were not quite “two of a kind,” that the stakes were not even, that society regarded women in a completely different light from men? Probably not at the time, though both of them knew it. Twenty years later, in The Second Sex, she would make the point that women were not the “other sex,” but the “second sex.” They were not seen as equal; they were viewed as inferior.

  While Sartre did not want to lose a freedom he had already enjoyed for several years, Beauvoir could not even quite imagine what her freedom would look like. Her female friends all aspired to marriage, and Beauvoir was as contemptuous of spinsters—vieilles filles—as everyone else. She knew her parents would be ashamed if she did not marry. Many people would pity her. Even her close friends, like Zaza and Maheu, would be taken aback by the idea of her having an open relationship with Sartre. And she herself had to come to terms with the idea. “I had not emancipated myself from all sexual taboos,” she admits. “Promiscuity in a woman still shocked me.”3